Monthly Archives: April 2008

TOOK ME AGES to find my compass this morning so I could find out where I was going.

When I finally found it, the needle was pointing towards magnetic north, but the odd thing is the “E” had swapped places with the “W”. It seems to now spell out NEWS, when really it should be spelling out NWSE, whatever that means.

I have had this compass for something like 40 years, and once I used it to find the Eiffel Tower – not because the needle was pointing to the iron edifice, but because I could see the tower and didn’t know how to navigate towards it.

I think my needle has fared somewhat better than the 3.5-inch, 5.25-inch and 8-inch floppy disks with their data demagnetised comprehensively. When I was a kid, having never heard the word before, I pronounced “awry” as “orry”. Didn’t realise it had something to do with a wry outlook. How naïve I was! ♥

WHETHER IT’S A RELIGIOUS or a scientific reason that makes people watch the skies does not, in the end, much matter.

The Babylonians, for example, produced 10s, perhaps 100s of thousands of clay tablets over the period the civilisation lasted. The British Museum picked up a huge amount of these in the Victorian era, and they are stored safely, perhaps never to be translated. There can’t be many scholars these days that understand the wedges put into clay tablets.

Arthur Koestler, an avowed atheist in his The Sleepwalkers, pointed out that magic and science were indistinguishable in those days. Very annoyingly, I can’t find my own Penguin edition of The Sleepwalkers, because this house is filled with way too many books. So I’ll have to go on memory. Victorian astronomers were shocked to find that the ephemerides of the Babylonians on the clay tablets the Brits unearthed were way more accurate than their own about the planetary positions of the then known planets.

The Greeks called the Babylonians “Chaldeans”, mistakenly, and before we knew where we were we had epicycles and all sorts of ridiculous theories about why the planets went retrograde. Observation is good.

Take for example these pix – made by our former sparring partner, ex-Rambus employee Richard Crisp. They record some facts in the universe. As the universe is bigger than us, trying to understand what any of it means is difficult even given our large roof brain. But they speak to all of us, don’t they?

They are here, here, here and here. I have written software to compute the positions of the Sun, the Moon and the planets in the past, much aided by books such as the Textbook on Spherical Astronomy by W.M. Smart (he was), the Astronomical Almanac, published by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, Practical Astronomy with your Calculator by Peter Duffet-Smith. Perturbations are extraordinary effects and the calculations required are mind boggling. Let us not talk about Brownian movements. Computers have made such things so much easier. Φ

FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH, there’s a tale going the rounds that the big cockup at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 was caused by, er, masking tape on the sensors.

The story goes like this. The software for the luggage sensing was thoroughly checked out prior to the opening, the hardware was all in place and everything was ready to go-go.

When everything started going belly up on the first day, the engineers were mystified as all seemed to be in order. That is until someone started walking round and noted that some of the sensors still had masking tape covering them.

Seems unlikely – surely the guys throw some real bags onto the conveyor belt before launch to do a dummy run? ♦

IN JUST A FEW days from now I will join the four staff I have already hired in Ole Bangalore, and supervise the introduction of the IT Examiner to the global scene.

There will also be an assault and battery of several freelancers contributing to the mix – the aim of the magazine being to interpret what’s happening in India and China to the rest of the world.

This magazine will not compete with tabloids like the Rogister and the INQster. We will be introducing journalism to the world and the workspace of the world as you haven’t seen it before. Our Indian journalists will be digging deeper and deeper to get our readers stories.

We will be off to a flying start with some top features about the companies that matter most in our lovely, lovely IT world. To us, where the money is, and where the money goes will be paramount. For was it not someone who said during the Nixon administration, “follow the money”?

APRIL 2007 was unusual for the UK. The whole month was dead hot, and then the rains set in. The swifts looked unhappy, two months of rain after the first of May doesn’t give them much chance to feed their little chicks.

But this April is far more like a regular English April. We append below a pic of how the Sanyo solar panels have done so far this month. Of course, fuel prices have gone up since we took advantage of the Department of Trade and Industry’s “generous” 50 per cent grant.

SOS IN MORSE CODE. Or May Day as it’s called here. The May trees are beginning to blossom in England like there’s no tomorrow, the swifts from sub-Saharan Africa ,or in real English south of the desert, are beginning to arrive ‘ere in ‘arrow after their long and very puzzling journey.

And I will arrive in Ole Bengaluru on the 2nd of May to launch yet another magazine, despite my feeble protests to the contrary. May is probably the hottest month in Karnataka, but Bangalore’s monsoon arrives in June. Up on the plateau it is really never too horrid, partly because of the plateau and because of the beautiful trees that line its boulevards. Also, if you look to the links on the right, you will see that Ole Bengaluru has the highest concentration of pubs in India.